Until 1957 Lawrence Durrell was an ordinary disaffected Englishman with a passion for writing, seemingly destined to live his life in a series of remote Mediterranean isles in the shadow of his renowned brother Gerald. In that year, however, he achieved recognition of his own with the publication of four books: his novel Justine, his Cyprus narrative Bitter Lemons, his diplomatic satire Esprit de Corps, and his adolescent adventure story White Eagles Over Serbia. Bitter Lemons won the Duff Cooper Award that year, presented to him by the Queen Mother. It was Justine, however, and the three subsequent novels in The Alexandria Quartet—Balthazar (1958), Mountolive (1958), and Clea (1960)—that defined him forever in the mind of the reading public. This tetralogy established the unreliable narrator as a metaphysical, as well as literary, issue. It dramatized the question of point of view, situating Durrell in a tradition that stretches from Friedrich...